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It was 10 years ago that Nick Carr notoriously proclaimed information technology didn’t matter anymore. The blurb for Carr’s May 2003 Harvard Business Review article summarized his argument: “As IT’s power and ubiquity have grown, its strategic importance has diminished.”

In truth, IT has always mattered. Even back in those distant days when the only computer was an abacus, it wasn’t ownership, but rather astute application, which set one user apart from another.

I don’t ever accept the principle that it’s impossible to differentiate. Or, to Zen it, she who believes her business can’t be differentiated from her competitor is ceding to that competitor the opportunity to do advantageous differentiation.

Perhaps Carr couldn’t see the enterprise forest because it was obscured by computing trees. His thesis rested in large part on his observation that computers were becoming ubiquitous—that is, commodities, which by definition are undifferentiated. As in: How can my business have a competitive advantage over yours when we’re both using the same technologies?

Or, as he put it:

“You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something they can’t have or do….They are becoming costs of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none.”

That was then; this is now. The objective of today’s post is to revisit Carr’s observations from the perspective of the 2013 CIO. The past decade of progress finds us in a world where IT has considerably broadened its footprint from the days when the bursting of the internet bubble was still a painful memory.

That orders-of-magnitude expansion of technological capabilities—along with concerted efforts to better align what computers do with what businesses require—is why IT today matters more than ever. And IT will become more core to business success with each successive year. Even a cursory look at recent advances—for example, sensors seeding Big Data and application supporting positive customer experiences on mobile devices—tells us that.

A look at the historical timeline uncovers the evidence. If we take the way-back machine to 2003, the available enterprise-computing options were far more circumscribed than they are today. (The PC has had a more linear evolution. A time traveler just returning from a 10-year journey would find their experience familiar, though they’d have to buy many new cables and redo all their PaSs#%words.)

Back then, we didn’t have robust clouds, thus limiting businesses’ options in accessing computational resources. We lacked servers with the sheer horsepower—supplied by processors ranging from the likes of ’s Core i7 x86 up to ’s new UltraSPARC M5 (datasheet here; PDF download)—to run businesses on a near-real-time decision-making basis. And, most of all, mobility was just beginning to stretch IT beyond office boundaries into the 24/7 world of anytime, anyplace business.

I haven’t even touched upon engineered systems—computers with hardware and software tuned in synch for accelerated performance. It goes without saying that big data, analytics, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications are a key part of the value proposition IT will deliver to businesses. And I haven’t even mentioned virtualization, multithreading, remote management, wireless networking, or a dozen other things that have boldly taken us where no previous computing technologies had gone before.

What’s Changed

The answer to what’s different today is also evident if we contrast Carr’s contention that the IT of a decade ago was tending toward sameness, with the almost infinite enterprise permutations now available.

Because everyone can now buy systems, applications, and connectivity configured for their specific needs, businesses do in fact have a clear and present ability to use computing technology as a strategic differentiator. They just have to work hard, employ people with wide-ranging smarts, and partner with an enterprise-savvy vendor.

If your glass is half full, you might point out that an underpinning of my observation is the fact that there are so many different ways to architect your data center that no one business can buy everything; ergo, differentiation by default. That’s not what I’m saying.

My optimistic argument is: You, Ms. CIO, have so many tools at your disposal, you can put the needs of your business first. You don’t have to buy a box and fit your business into its way of doing things. Rather, you are the decider, your vendor is your provider, and they march to your strategic imperatives. (I’m neglecting the fact that legacy technology sometimes snarls the best forward-pointing intentions—for example, by requiring workarounds—but you get my drift.)

If much of the above reads like he said, he said, let’s wrap up the debate with the recognition that Carr has come to concede it’s not the computers, per se, that are the problem. As he told Network World:

“What I think I did…was to put the question of IT firmly into the broader question of business strategy. My argument was that this isn’t really about hardware or software, it’s not really about technology, it’s about broader issues of strategy.”

Now that everyone’s clear it’s all about strategy, strategy, strategy, I have to tell you the bad news. Strategic planning is easier than tactical implementation.

That’s because of what I call the complexity barrier. However difficult connecting a bunch of remote offices to the main server may have once been, it pales in comparison to the challenge of presenting a consistent experience to endusers regardless of computing formfactor. How about provisioning all those BYOD smartphones and tablets, while iteratively improving endpoint security? And have you tried explaining your hybrid-cloud plans to your CEO yet?

It’s not just that these tasks aren’t trivial. Computing has become so heavy-duty, it’s no longer completely accessible to those without some technical background. I don’t think this point has been surfaced widely enough. The implication is that the CIO job is going to increasingly encompass the need for evangelism and education within organizations—both for buy-in from the executive suite and for adoption by end users.

For CIOs and their teams, conquering this complexity barrier is the only way to reap competitive IT advantage. I’m not saying the challenges are insurmountable. I am saying they’re considerable. However, if you leverage the knowledge of your team and that of your enterprise-computing partner, you can succeed in building out capabilities that are indeed different from those of your less-astute competitors.

I guess it all boils down to “Caveat CIO.” Know that your horizons are unlimited, and your opportunities many. Yet this means you must make choices—none of them easy—about where to spend your dollars and deploy your resources. You must pick partners who can help you not just because of the equipment they may sell, but so that you can access advice, expertise, and experience that may not be available in-house.

Finally, you must build flexibility into your evolving enterprise architecture. Because in 10 years’ time, today’s hottest IT choices will seem just as old-school as single-core server.

What are your toughest IT choices? E-mail me here or follow me on Twitter at @awolfe58.